History Mysteries

I've also heard the story that Jimmy Hoffa is in the cement at the Meadowlands. But the odds that he is on the 50 yard line are not good, as mobsters wouldn't have had the blueprints to tell where the 50 yard line was going to be; and the 50-yard line's concrete may not have been poured that day.

See the movie "Rapa Nui" about the Easter Islanders. The theory there is that they cut down all the trees to provide rollers to move the big heads into place. Then after the island was denuded of trees, the islanders could not prepare food, warm themselves, make boats to fish, etc. What semblance of civilization they had collapsed and they reverted to cannibalism and barbarism and virtually died out. I haven't been to Easter Island, so I'm no authority, but I seem to recall that contrary to public imagination, the giant heads face inland, not toward the sea.

I don't even have a guess about Jimmy Hoffa, but I think equus may be on the right track.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/easterisland.shtml

I think it was Robert Silverberg's book, Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, that got me caught up in archaeology.

I read about the Titanic. I think it is pretty clear it did NOT hit an iceberg. The lookout THOUGHT there was an iceberg, and the ship swerved quickly, and THAT caused the ship to sink. The architect probably realized it right away - and told BBruce ismay, and theer has been a TITANIC coverup ever since.

If this the true cause (the swift turn) - if it was not known, the other two ships just like it would have sunk too. So, White Star Lines had to know. It had to be a tightly held secret, but they had to know.

There were 3 sister ships. One of them, the Brittanic sunk in 1916 - and I suspect if you investigated that, you would find that there was no known cause. It is supposed to have been hit by a German torpedo from a submarine or sunk by a mine. I found no other details - but this should not be such a big mystery. I suspect this would not really check out.

The explanation could be that in fact the Britannic made a manuever that broke the hull. At that time it was operated by the British government - it had been seized twice by the British government for use as a hospital ship - the first time on on November 13, 1915 and later again afteerr being returned -
so the secret might not have been passed on to and later again in 1916 the captain.

the third sister ship, the Majestic, remasined in srvice until the late 1930s.

It would be interesting to speculate who knew the secret and who was still maintaining the coverup. And for how long.

That was O.J. simpson. The question is if he had either help or advice. the most likely adviser would be Robert Kardishian.

Somebody had to take the I think the Bronco to a car wash and park it inside the estate after Allan Park had left for the airport with O. J. Simpson - and DIDN'T see the car that was later tehre the next morning.

The second glove was probably xdropped where it waas because Kardishian - or whoever - thought O.J. Simpson was inside - but actually it was only Kato there.

All the other clorthing from the murder was left at the airport - and somebody had to take it away. O J Simpson could posisbly have taken a chance it would not be noticed but it also could have been arranged.

I don't think the murder was a last minute decision but I do think O.J. Simpson kept pondering through the night or at least a bit earlier if he should go through with it.

Paula Barbieri, O.J. Simpson's girlfriend, may have been part of the plot - in teh sense that she agreed to break up with him so as to encourage OJ to continue.

OJ Simpson probably did this not so much out of jealousy as because Nicoole had thretended to go to the IRS about his making money from signing autograohs and not reporting it - or some other thing like that. His co-conspiratorsd told him taht if Nicole was dead, the IRS would not follow up the lead that they told him she had provided. But most likely she hadn't actually done that.

Oh - and of course somebody fixed the jury, after getting the National Enquirer to wrote a bunch of stories about OJ not being guilty. (Not all jurors weer fixed. In fact the instructions probably were not to vote not guilty unless some unfxed jurors also did)

When OJ made that announcement about having cionfidencve in the jury I thought his lawyers were only lying to him about having fixe dthe jury but it looks like they were telling him the truth.

And then after the cionvictin, the publicity machine turned around on a dime - the National Enquirer did - and helped get him found guilty by a civil court jury. And now maybe maneuvered him into committing a crime and gfoing to jail in Las Vegas.

Judge Crater was corrupt. He was probably killed by organized crime, which also spread different stories about him.

Judge Crater disappeared August 6, 1930, not during the 1920s, although the Depression hadn't really kicked in by mid summer 1930. He qas almost certainly murdered since his mistress also disappeared a month later (not with him)

According to Wikipedia:

On August 19, 2005, authorities revealed they received a letter written half a century before by Stella Ferrucci-Good. In it, the woman identified a location near West Eighth Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, at the current site of the New York Aquarium, where she claimed the judge was buried under the boardwalk. Moreover, the letter identified Crater's killers as her husband, NYPD officers Robert Good and Charles Burns, also bodyguard of Abe Reles of Murder, Inc. and Burns's brother Frank, a cab driver.[14]

Police confirmed that skeletal remains had been discovered at that site in the 1950s. Modern DNA techniques, unavailable in the 1950s, would make it easy to determine whether a set of remains were Judge Crater's. However, the bones discovered were almost immediately reburied in a potter's field on Hart Island, New York, among hundreds (if not thousands) of other unmarked and unidentified remains, and it would now be a daunting task to find those bones among so many.

See:

http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2005/08/19/2005-08-19_judge_crater_found___dead_ga.html

"The letter was written by an elderly woman who died of natural causes in June [2005] , they said.

Upon her death, family members opened a safe-deposit box, where they found a letter with "Do Not Open Until My Death" instructions on the envelope.

In it, the woman claimed that her father told her on his deathbed where Crater's remains were and that cab driver Frank Burn was his killer.

The letter also mentions Burn's brother and a city cop named Charles.

The names of the woman and her father are being kept secret.

Detectives said everything the woman wrote so far has been corroborated

No, it was the tuitanic's twin ship (improved in some respects but with the same steel) taht was supposed to maybe have bene a victim of aU-boat attcak. Or a mine, In 1916.

Let me get this straight ... the lookout thought there was an iceberg, but there really wasn't, so the ship swerved quickly, and THAT caused the ship to sink.

How did that work, exactly?

I think you should read this article. The Titanic certainly did hit an iceberg.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/09/25/the-secret-of-how-the-titanic-sunk.html?PageNr=3

Excerpts from the link:

Why she sank - did they see an iceberg or not?

On the night of April 14, 1912, though, only a few days into the Titanic's maiden voyage, its Achilles' heel was exposed. The ship wasn't nimble enough to avoid an iceberg that lookouts spotted (the only way to detect icebergs at the time) at the last minute in the darkness. As the ice bumped along its starboard side, it punched holes in the ship's steel plates, flooding six compartments. In a little over two hours, the Titanic filled with water and sank.

And as for her sister ships:

Harland & Wolff, now an engineering and design firm, flatly rejects the notion that its rivets were weak. Tom McCluskie, the company's retired archivist, points out that Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, was riveted with the same iron and served without incident for 25 years, surviving several major collisions, including being rammed by a British cruiser. "Olympic deliberately rammed a German submarine during the First World War and cut it in half," says McCluskie. "She was plenty strong." The Britannic sank after hitting a mine during World War I. Both ships were strengthened after the Titanic disaster with double hulls and taller bulkheads, but their rivets were never changed.

Regarding the conspiracy theories:

Some conspiracy theorists believe that the company's silence was a sign of a coverup, and that the post-disaster retrofitting of Titanic's sister ships proves Harland & Wolff knew its ship was flawed. But most historians come to a different conclusion. "The fact that the ship broke up on the surface does not mean she was weak," says Long. When 38,000 tons of water filled its bow, pushing the stern up even 11 degrees out of the water, the ship was loaded beyond its capacity and cracked in two.

Could the Titanic have been stronger? Certainly. Higher-quality rivets or a thicker hull might have kept the ship afloat longer. But ultimately, the Titanic was designed to be a passenger liner, not a battleship. "[The ship] was built to the best of their knowledge at the time and to the proper standards. Nothing could have survived what happened to it," says McCluskie. Extensive forensic analysis of the wreckage has, in a way, brought the story of the Titanic to a familiar place. "The ship," says Foecke, "was just not designed to run into icebergs." When it did, nothing could stop its journey to the bottom.

I'm getting tired of these conspiracy theories.

Jesus, what lunacy. Britannic was victim of an explosion, and was making no radical manoeuvres which would have damaged her hull. She sank rather quickly for much the same reason that Titanic sank-- water-tight security failed, although in the case of Britannic, this was because of damage caused to bulkheads and tunnels by the explosion. In neither case, however, was the ship in question "unsinkable." Both ships would have sunk in the same circumstances, but the question was how long would it take. The tragedy of Titanic was that the cheapskates who ordered her (an American consortium) kept finding ways to reduce the costs, and her complement of lifeboats was reduced from a planned 64 to just 16. Despite having sunk much faster than she would have if water-tight security had been observed, with 64 boats, the entire party on board Titanic likely could have been saved.

In the case of Britannic, had her water-tight security worked as planned, she might have been able to steam to Piraeus, the port for the city of Athens. That this security failed, in all but one case, was undoubtedly the result of the structural damage suffered by the explosion--the hull was subjected to sufficient torsion that tunnels used by fire fighters were damaged, preventing their use for that purpose, and preventing them being fully closed for water-tight security. The loss of life aboard Britannic resulted from the misappropriation of lifeboats by crew members, which resulted in two of the boats drifting back toward the stern and being chopped up by the propellers. When the captain became aware of this, he telegraphed full stop to the engine room still in operation. (It was a normal procedure to keep steaming ahead in such a situation, so that lifeboats would clear the vessel as they were launched; properly commanded, the tragedy of the two boats being sucked in the propellers would very likely not have happened.)

There may have been a passenger liner named Majestic, but it was no sister ship of either Titanic or Britannic. There were three ships in that class, which was the Olympic class, because the first ship launched was RMS Olympic. Britannic was never "seized" by the government. She was in the yards, being completed when war broke out, and White Star Lines put her into storage. When the government requisitioned that ship, as was done with so many other passenger liners, she entered service as HMHS Britannic, that is to say, His Majesty's Hospital Ship. She knew no other service and there were no great secrets involved in the brief life of Britannic. She gave good service. The cause of the explosion hasn't been determined, but it almost certainly was not a submarine attack, given the fact that she continued to steam after the explosion, and a submarine would have continued to attack in those circumstances. It was almost certain that the explosion was caused by a mine, and the wreck has been carefully explored since Jacques Cousteau first dived on the wreck in the 1970s. Only 40 lives were lost on HMHS Britannic demonstrating that if not unsinkable, properly managed, the three ships of this class were capable of sustaining tremendous damage without necessarily suffering a great loss of life. Titanic involved so much loss of life because there simply weren't enough lifeboats. RMS Olympic collided with a cruiser in 1911, and was repaired, and continued in service. Not unsinkable, they were all very well-built ships. RMS Olympic continued in service until the 1930s.

examinations found excessive amounts of "Silicate slag " in both the steelplates and the rivets .
"Silicate slag "is an important constituent of wrought iron, but is not a constituent that is desirable in steel because it is a type of glass and is brittle .

a/t the source , the steel being used in the construction of the titanic - for both the plates and the rivets - was not of highest quality and therefor a contributing factor in the sinking of the ship .



link to complete article :
http://www.rmstitanic.net/index.php4?page=319

don't know if there have been further reports issued .
i recall that mention of "weak steel" was made in a made for TV documentary some years ago .

Sinking of the Titanic

Whom ever posted about the Titanic being sunk by a torpedo is mixed up. The Titanic's sister ship the Britanic was converted into a hospital ship and sunk by a German torpedo near the Island of Creat in WWII.

It seems more possible that the Britannic was sunk by (a) mine(s) - the German submarine U 73 had laid 12 mines in the Kea Channel, just two miles from where the Britannic actually sunk.